Rusty patched bumble bee recommended for list

by GILLIAN FLACCUS Associated Press

Thursday, September 22nd 2016

In this August 2015 photo provided by The Xerces Society, a rusty patched bumble bee collects pollen from a flower in Madison, Wis. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service on Thursday, Sept. 22, 2016, formally recommended this bumble bee for endangered status after reviewing reports from the Portland, Ore.-based Xerces Society that show the species has disappeared from about 90 percent of its historic range in the past 20 years. (Rich Hatfield/The Xerces Society via AP)

PORTLAND — Federal wildlife officials on Thursday made a formal recommendation to list the rusty patched bumble bee as an endangered species because it has disappeared from about 90 percent of its historic range in just the past two decades.

The U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service made the recommendation after the Portland-based Xerces Society petitioned the agency on behalf of the bee in 2013 and presented studies showing it was struggling due to a combination of disease, habitat loss, climate change and overuse of pesticides on commercial crops.

If approved, the species would be the first bee listed as endangered in the continental United States, said Rich Hatfield, senior conservation biologist with the Xerces Society.

The group, which advocates for the preservation of pollinator insects such as butterflies and bees, used "citizen scientists" to take counts of the rusty patched bumble bees.

The bees once ranged over 28 states stretching from Minnesota to Maine and into parts of Canada, but are now limited to small and scattered colonies in about a dozen states, including Illinois, Ohio and Minnesota, and one Canadian province, the Fish & Wildlife Service said in a statement Thursday.

Even those populations may have disappeared or been reduced because the last counts were done in 2000, the agency said.

"This is a very difficult thing to track. It's not like honey bees that are out in boxes that people can go out and count so keeping track of them in the wild is very difficult," Hatfield said of the bumble bee's numbers.

The rusty patched bumble bee gets its name for a crescent-shaped, reddish patch on its abdomen. It is one of 4,000 native bee species in North America, Hatfield said.